The Smell Of Rain

A cold March wind danced around the dead of night in
Dallas as the Doctor walked into the small hospital room
of Diana Blessing.
Still groggy from surgery, her husband David held her hand
as they braced themselves for the latest news.

That afternoon of March 10,1991,
complications had forced Diana, only 24-weeks
pregnant, to undergo a cesarean to deliver the couple's
new daughter, Danae Lu Blessing.
At 12 inches long and weighing only one pound and nine
ounces, they already knew she was perilously premature.

Still, the doctor's soft words dropped like bombs.
'I don't think she's going to make it, he said, as kindly as he could
"There's only a 10-percent chance she will live through the night,
and even then, if by some slim chance make it,
her future could be a very cruel one."

Numb with disbelief, David and Diana listened as the
doctor described the devastating problems Danae would
likely face ifshe survived.
She would never walk, she would never talk,
she would probably be blind,
and she would certainly be prone to other
catastrophic conditions from cerebral palsy
to complete mental retardation, and on and on.

"No! No!" was all Diana could say. She and David,
with their 5-year-old son Dustin, had long dreamed
of the day they would have a daughter to
become a family of four.

Now, within a matter of hours, that dream was
slipping away. Through the dark hours of morning
as Danae held onto life by the thinnest thread,
Diana slipped in and out of sleep, growing more and
more determined that their tiny daughter would live-
and live to be a healthy, happy young girl.
But David, fully awake and listening to
additional dire details of their daughter's chances of
ever leaving the hospital alive, much less healthy,
knew he must confront his wife with the inevitable.

David walked in and said that we needed to talk about
making funeral arrangements. Diana remembers
'I felt so bad for him because he was
doing everything, trying to include me in what was
going on, but I just wouldn't listen, I couldn't listen.
' I said, "No, that is not going to happen, no way!
I don't care what the doctors say; Danae is not going to
die! One day she will be just fine, and she will be
coming home with us!"

As if willed to live by Diana's determination, Danae
clung to life hour after hour, with the help of every
medical machine and marvel her miniature body
could endure. But as those first days passed, a new agony
set in for David and Diana.
Because Danae's under-developed nervous
system was essentially 'raw,' the lightest kiss
or caress only intensified her discomfort, so they
couldn't even cradle their tiny baby girl against their
chests to offer the strength of their love.
All they could do, as Danae struggled alone
beneath the ultraviolet light in the tangle of tubes
and wires, was to pray that God would stay close
to their precious little girl.

There was never a moment when Danae suddenly
grew stronger. But as the weeks went by, she did
slowly gain an ounce of weight here and an ounce of
strength there. At last, when Danae turned two months old,
her parents were able to hold her in their arms
for the very first time. And two months later-though
doctors continued to gently but grimly warn that her
chances of surviving, much less living any kind of normal life,
were next to zero, Danae went home from the hospital,
just as her mother had predicted.

Today, five years later, Danae is a petite but
feisty young girl with glittering gray eyes and an
unquenchable zest for life. She shows no
signs, what so ever, of any mental or physical
impairment. Simply, she is everything a little girl can be
and more-but that happy ending is far
from the end of her story.

One blistering afternoon in the summer of 1996 near
her home in Irving, Texas, Danae was sitting in her
mother's lap in the bleachers of a local
ballpark where her brother Dustin's baseball team
was practicing. As always, Danae was chattering
non-stop with her mother and several other
adults sitting nearby when she suddenly fell silent.
Hugging her arms across her chest, Danae asked,
"Do you smell that?"

Smelling the air and detecting the approach of a
thunderstorm, Diana replied, "Yes, it smells like rain."
Danae closed her eyes and again asked,
"Do you smell that?"
Once again, her mother replied,
"Yes, I think we're about to get wet,
it smells like rain."

Still caught in the moment, Danae shook her head,
patted her thin shoulders with her small hands
and loudly announced,
"No, it smells like Him. It smells like God
when you lay your head on
His chest."

Tears blurred Diana's eyes as Danae then happily
hopped down to play with the other children.
Before the rains came, her daughter's words
confirmed what Diana and all the members of the
extended Blessing family had known, at least in their
hearts, all along. During those long days
and nights of her first two months of her life, when
her nerves were too sensitive for them to touch her,
God was holding Danae on His chest and
it is His loving scent that she remembered so well.

Authour Unknown

Drop me a line if you like this story.